Anonymous Patron writes “The Telegraph Reports The “doors” of Britain’s first known online lending library are to open for business next week, bringing reassurance for literary luddites who fear the march of technology could overcome the manuscript.
My Book Your Book, which operates only in cyberspace, will offer thousands of paperback titles to its members, from fiction hits such as Zadie Smith’s White Teeth to the GCSE staple To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.”
More choice the better!
This would not be everyone’s cup of tea. I prefer to read fiction in book, but non-fiction I may prefer to read in e-book format for its easier searching functions. At the end of the day, it is just another format and access point. And it provides a choice for people, and the more choice we have the better! Libraries should not be threatened by it.
Looks like PaperbackSwap
My Book Your Book looks as if it’s very similar in spirit, and in the niche it occupies, to PaperbackSwap.com. Some time back, Bibliofuture recommended PaperbackSwap.com to us, and I joined up as a result.
At PaperbackSwap, they post member raves about the site. I am interested (and, of course, chagrined) to see how many of them cite some version of “not having to go to the library” as a reason they LOVE PaperbackSwap. Absolutely a foreign concept to me — not wanting to go the the library — but one that we should all recognize as being alive and well out there among the people.
Here’s how I use PaperbackSwap. When I joined, I posted a big pile of mostly romance novels that had been left behind in the office over a year ago by a former co-worker. Since romance novels are approximately equvalent to ballast in my world, they were the clear candidates for trading away. I soon gained enough credits to start acquiring some books I really want to read and maybe hang onto. I have concentrated on titles that my local PL system (23 branches) does not have in its catalog. Having just discovered Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series in the last couple of years, I am working my way through in order, and my PL does not have many of the titles. My first couple of PaperbackSwap acquisitions were Reaper Man and Soul Music. (I am still looking for Mort, the next in my reading sequence.) Today, I received a copy of The Chrysalids , by John Wyndham. The unexpected bonus is that the copy I received is a UK Penguin edition, ca. late 1970s: the best possible paperback! I am looking forward to re-reading it after 25+ years.
Anyway, my point (and I do have one) is that sites/services/communities like PaperbackSwap and My Book Your Book can supplement the services of a library. Two more things to say about this: (1) I see my books in many cases going to some areas that look fairly rural and remote, and the readers may not have the easiest access to a library. And (2) In my large suburban-metro-area PL, the vast majority of the paperback holdings are not cataloged. So it’s a matter of browsing the carousels in the individual branches and maybe getting lucky, if we’re talking about the kind of book that’s most likely to be a paperback: romances, science fiction, mysteries, thrillers. I have a hunch these are the genres that see the most traffic on PaperbackSwap.